Welcome to Kiwiboomers, a liberal online magazine written with attitude

Let’s be clear: constitutionally, the Executive decides where and how troops are deployed. John Key did not need Parliament’s approval to go to war.
And let’s be clear: Key is going to war. Iraq is at war. Training its troops is joining its war.
But Key’s denial of a parliamentary vote is a mite regal in the 2010s. We are a modern […]

New Year’s Day and the Stoke streets are gleaming, washed by a morning of solid rain and blown dry by an energetic northerly. The tall sky is Nelson-summer-blue and the breeze-riffled trees turn sunlight into lace on the Railway Reserve path. It’s mid-morning and Emma and I are out walking.
Nearly […]

Summer cosseted us with its warmth this Saturday afternoon, though inside the conference room we were hearing about something much chillier.
It was so warm the doors were left open and if you listened, you could hear an unfamiliar rustle outside: the eddies of dry leaves gathering pace in the carpark. […]

Revitalised by our rest we decided to walk back to our hotel. On the way we stopped to look at a construction site and a very large hole in the ground with parts of what looked like a bricked over sewerage tunnel exposed by the excavation. Men were digging holes […]

Once we put up with whingeing Poms. Now it’s whingeing Aussies. They are far richer than us, so what’s the beef? And why should we bother?
The problem is China — or, rather, China plus Australians’ punchy self-importance. In security matters that self-belief took it into Iraq in 2003 and is taking it there now (with a John Key coda, about […]

An A-Z of New Zealand traditions & Folklore by Gordon Ell
(Published by New Holland)

Opo the Dolphin
(It was the kind of summer we’re having now when Opo swam into our lives and here’s a record from Kiwiosities, of those happy days.)
During the summer of 1955-56, a bottle-nosed dolphin made friends with the people of Opononi on the southern shores of […]

Dunedin’s ‘The Evening Star’ newspaper has long gone and I’m now old and cynical. But, there’s one moment I’ll never forget from my halcyon days as a cub reporter there – seeing Johnny Cash declare his love for his wife, June Carter Cash, on the stage at the Town Hall.
When I got the […]

I want to tell you about some people I used to spend a bit of time with.
They were fabulous folk.
They opened their hearts and their wallets to me, and all I had to do was show up at their place a few times a year.
I’m talking about the good people of Sky […]

Depression is too strong a word to describe what drove me to start marching around Wanaka with a sign. It was more a sense of futility that after more than two decades of Labour saying this and National saying that, the low-paid, the poor, have been abandoned and nothing is changing.
So I wondered what I could do besides writing about […]